So before the EVE bomb hit, everyone was discussing the announcement of the 300k subs in WAR. I would have said more earlier, but I didn’t quite feel like making a one line post consisting of “I fucking told you so!”

Actually, my views have shifted a little, I’m not so down on PvE these days. And arguably, the relative inadequacies of their PvE may have cost them the most. I still stand firmly by the simple truth that you won’t get WoW’s numbers with a new MMO. And a large part of that is something that I had already put in words sometime around the end of GDC ’08. “Any new game will be, on release, a categorically worse game than every other game on the market.” Of course, I didn’t account for releases within a short period, but basically a new game simply cannot hope to stack up to a mature game in terms of quality and quantity of content, it’s impossible.

(By the by, the friend I told that too said that he had been told almost exactly the same thing by Scott Hartsmann while at GDC that year, thus how I know the time frame. Which reminds me, I consider oHai the next big project to watch. The last one, with audio verification to prove I’m not changing my mind in hindsight, that I considered that way was Metaplace, and lately they’ve completely blown me away. And that also reminds me, there is a beta and I have 10 invite keys if you want in too.)